It’s no secret that technology has had a profound impact on marketing. The rise of the internet and social media has given brands an unprecedented level of access to their consumers. And as customers have gotten savvier and the competition keeps growing, brands have had to up their technology game.
But even though researching and hearing pitches for new-fangled technology is critical to finding new ways to grow your brand, it can be easy to forget the importance of considering what you already have in your repertoire. Evaluating and re-evaluating your MarTech stack needs to be a fundamental part of your operations to avoid issues like overflowing tech, convoluted workflows, and losses in profits.
Easier said than done, sure — but that’s exactly what this blog is going to help you with! Keep reading to find out how to best step back and assess your MarTech stack components to start seeing success in all of your branding and marketing efforts.
Suggested reading: Want to find out more about how to get your MarTech stack under control? Give our blog Is Your Marketing Stack Getting out of Control? a read!
Why your MarTech stack even needs re-evaluating
So the bit about “overflowing tech, convoluted workflows, and losses in profits” may have sounded scary on its own, but we think it’s worth explaining WHY that would even happen if you didn’t re-evaluate your MarTech stack.
It all comes down to making sure your brand is operating at its fullest and most efficient capacity. The whole point of having a MarTech stack is to both optimise your existing workflows and see growth in your results. Neither goal is going to be achieved if any of those tools in your stack aren’t high in quality and/or there are just too many to expect any of them to run efficiently. At a time when brands have to stay on the lookout against growing competition, anything that can be seen as a hurdle to your branding being at its best has to be addressed and optimised immediately.
There’s no hard and fast rule for how often you should re-evaluate your Martech stack. However, a good time to re-evaluate is whenever you are adding a new piece to the stack and when some of your existing pieces are coming up to renewal. By doing so, you can ensure your stack is always up to date and fulfilling for your teams.
Step 1. Assess your workflows
Speaking of your MarTech stack being at the top of its game for your teams, that’s the first step in the process. After all, your employees are going to be the ones utilising these tools on a daily basis so it’s crucial to check for the following factors.
- Communication barriers: Are team members able to communicate with each other seamlessly? Can brand assets (images, videos, basically the materials that make up your brand) be shared between teams without having to change the format and/or file type every time? Are business-critical communications being recorded and stored when needed?
- Inefficiencies: Is every single MarTech tool really being used to its full advantage/potential? Are there gaps in performance for any of the tools that you need to be filled by another?
- Redundancies: How many/often do these tools overlap in terms of their capabilities? Would removing one or more of these tools pose a significant change to how your workflows function?
- Lack of standardisation: Do different teams have to rely on different tools and is this causing workflow barriers?
- Staggered integrations: How well do your tools — if any — work with each other?
Step 2. Follow the reporting insights
Though getting feedback from your team members is important in assessing how well your digital marketing and branding tools operate, this kind of insight can’t speak to how financially viable and profitable they are. Having some form of analytics reporting that can grant you visibility over what’s being used, how often, and for what is hugely valuable to deciding what tools to keep and which to discard.
With all the above in mind, we can understand that many brand managers — especially in small businesses — probably don’t have the capacity for a reporting and analytics tool. So when re-evaluating your tool stack and identifying gaps in efficiency, we’d highly recommend prioritising a tool that can deliver you valuable reports. Brandworkz’s own Reporting & Analysis feature presents helpful information on how brand assets are used so that you can make better-informed decisions around your investments.
Suggested reading: Keep your marketing stack under control and maintain brand consistency. For detailed help doing just that, check out our free resource — The Brand Consistency Toolkit.
Step 3. Consider a single-platform solution
We’ve spent the whole blog so far talking about identifying tools in your MarTech stack that aren’t working up to speed so you can avoid an inefficiencies overflow. But what about when you identify gaps that can only be filled with a software solution? Especially if there are multiple of them?
Luckily for you, single-platform solutions like brand management software are ideal to filling these gaps without ending up back to square one and with more tools than ever. That doesn’t mean any and every brand management software platform out there is necessarily best suited to your processes. The ideal solution should include a variety of helpful capabilities such as:
- Digital asset management (DAM): A simple-to-use DAM system is essential to keeping every part of your branding and marketing streamlined. It acts as a repository to centralise all of your approved, on-brand assets to guarantee that everyone — from your teams, to your stakeholders, to you — have streamlined access to the materials they need.
- Digital and Print templates: Templates help ensure your brand assets are consistent AND your teams are empowered, regardless of whether or not they have the design skills needed to develop assets from scratch.
- Editable brand guidelines: Your brand is inevitably going to shift and develop over time, and that flexibility should be communicated to your teams. Comprehensive brand guidelines that can be amended and distributed at will are valuable to keeping your teams and assets totally aligned.
Workflow management: Having visibility over the branding and marketing work that gets done by your teams is obviously critical to ensuring things are done as quickly and efficiently as possible — but the sheer number of tasks to follow and approvals you have to give can make this easier said than done. The right brand management software platform will streamline this process with an automated approvals and workflows dashboard.
Step 4. Prioritise streamlined integrations
The bottom line to optimising your MarTech stack is smooth integration. It’s all well and good to add and remove tools as you see fit, but any tech choice won’t be worth much if it can’t effectively collaborate with others in your library.
Though a solution like brand management software poses a lot of advantages for your workflows and ROI, this doesn’t mean it should be seen as a total replacement for all of your tools and programs. Rather, it should be capable of working alongside the applications that are fundamental to your branding and marketing strategies, especially when it comes to brand asset creation and distribution.
For example, the Brandworkz platform offers an Integrations feature that works with a multitude of leading branding applications. These include mainstays like Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Office. In fact, the seamlessness of this integration means that your tools aren’t just working well together — but actively improving the outputs of each other.
Brand management software streamlines your tool stacks
Re-evaluating your Martech stack can be a daunting task, but it’s important to do so in order to ensure that you’re using the best tools possible. By following the tips mentioned in this article, you should be able to make the process easier and more efficient. But the best way to address any MarTech tool stack that isn’t operating at its best — or is on track to be — is by looking towards brand management software.
Brand management software solutions like our product Brandworkz are primed to fulfil all of your branding and marketing needs within the single platform. The Brandworkz library of features includes growth-enabling functions like a DAM system coupled with editable brand guidelines, Digital & Print templates, and in-depth reporting. This array of capabilities means that everything from streamlining your marketing activities to improving your customer experience is covered. Our Integrations capability further guarantees that Brandworkz can work with any and every brand’s marketing technology stack.
To see how Brandworkz brand management software can help you get your brand growing on the path to success today, feel free to book a demo.
